The present invention relates generally to the fields of Interactive Characters and social interaction, and in particular to a system for creating and supervising the behavior of these characters.
In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., developed Eliza, a program which made natural language conversation with a computer. Eliza did this using a relatively simple process.
The benefits of interactive characters are substantial. Interactive characters have increased comprehension by eighty-two percent and by ninety percent when accompanied by bulleted text summaries.
Sixty-four percent of users prefer receiving information from interactive characters, as opposed to text or audio. As an example, “click-through” rates for an electronic advertisement increased by 700 percent when an electronic character was used. The use of interactive characters results in substantial cost savings; for example, with just one customer service application, a corporation realized a multimillion dollar cost benefit.
Simultaneous to the development of interactive characters, videogames, training simulations and educational applications have made great strides since 1990. The graphic quality of games such as Everquest or World of Warcraft approaches that of film. Character movement is sophisticated and fluid.
Techniques, that until recently needed countless hours of rendering, can be displayed in real-time. As a result, virtual worlds look polished and interactive characters can do many human things; walk, run, jump, dance, fight, plot their own paths between locations, and avoid obstacles in the virtual world.
Additionally, speech recognition technology achieves high recognition rates, the modeling of human speech for recognition systems, has also allowed character lip-synch to be easily automated.
Consider the state of movies in the early twentieth century: Actors used broad gestures derived from the theater, and narrative was limited to visual interactions with occasional subtitles. Though the medium was immensely popular, the moment Al Jolson spoke and sang in The Jazz Singer, silent films quickly went extinct.
Despite the advances in graphic animation quality, characters' interactions with humans and character-to-character interaction remain crude and awkward. In current interactive entertainments like The Sims, or Grand Theft Auto, character interaction with other characters or players is limited in the same way early film was limited: Gestures are broad and overstated and characters speak in cartoon bubbles. Story development is marginal, often consisting of levels, which boast different scenery, but similar action.
Similarly, training simulations and e-learning applications suffer from the limitation of not addressing the verbal nature of human interactions, despite the fact that the majority of human interactions are verbal.
For the last ten years the primary developments in interactive entertainment have involved interactive characters in virtual worlds. For the most part, these characters represent a similar level of development to film in 1926.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method of supervising the behavior of interactive characters using dynamic, fuzzy, and social rules.